Responsible Liberties
by Scarabbug
Summary: They’ve both moved on since that Fourth of July. One shot, postcanon. No actual pairings, but some suggestions of them.


This story is inspired a fic in the DCU, Flash: the Fastest Man Alive section. "Like Lightning" by lj user **"dorksidefiker"**

**Disclaimer: **Don't own, do enjoy.

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_"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." _--George Bernard Shaw

Responsible Liberties.

The Fourth of July meant a lot of things to Mark Hollander.

He wasn't American, really, but he knew the importance of the date; about Jefferson and the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence. He knew that to Chuck, the date was more about the fireworks and that movie with all the aliens invading the planet. He knew that his dad had adapted to the whole idea with his usual "getting to know our new home country" gusto.

For Mark, though, the Fourth of July was significant for a different kind of freedom. The one which happened five years ago. That was the day the game hadreset,and when he'd found out what it was like to actually win it.

It'd turned out that winning was everything it was cracked up to be, and nothing like it should be.

But anyway, that was all in the past.

This year, he'd been walking around Conestoga since the first rockets went up at sunset. Chuck had been with him, for the first few streets, then he'd gotten distracted by one of the hot dog stalls in the park, so Mark had gone on alone.

The second biggest fire in town was behind the middle school playing field. This one seemed to be pretty much a kids-only zone. A bunch of older teenagers were playing with a box of fireworks nearby, setting them off with matches and getting singed in the process. There were probably going to be a few admittances to the burns ward at the Conestoga Hills Hospital by the end of the evening, but for now, nobody seems to care.

There were a few people there who were almost Mark's age, too. Just standing around, the way he was, not really joining in. Mark found her at the far corner of the field, just sitting and watching the bonfire.

Somehow, Mark knew that she'd _wanted_ to be found this evening. Why else would she have chosen that morph?

'I never thought you'd come back here,' he said. She looked up, and now he was certain that she'd been expecting him. 'Hi, Felicity.'

'Hello there, mortal,' she waited for him to sit down. 'You've grown up.'

'Yeah, I get that a lot, these days.'

Somebody below had let off a Catherine wheel without bothering to secure it to anything and now there were several kids running off in a panic. Felicity watched them with vague amusement, while Mark took a second to check that nobody was going to be hurt before he dared to sit down again.

'Still have the heroic impulses, then,' Felicity commented.

'Guess some people don't ever change,' Mark answered.

'Clearly,' Felicity was examining a marshmallow she'd picked out of someone else's supply. Which looked kind of weird, but then, Mark figured that he should've been used to that kind of stuff by now.

'How did you find me?'

'We worked something out.'

'Must've been quite a challenge,' Felicity commented. 'The game is old news, now. Things have changed. How... could you have found the power to track my signature?'

Mark knew that what she really wanted to ask was "how does my signature still _exist_ when my world doesn't?" but neither of them said so. He shrugged. 'Like I said, we worked something out.'

Felicity seemed satisfied with that for a moment, then she asked. 'So, who was it?'

Mark blinked. 'Who was what?'

'You know exactly what I mean,' Felicity said. 'You tracked me down here; you must have employed some kind of tracking system.'

'You didn't make yourself difficult to find this time, though.'

'All the same, you must have needed the signature of another… character, to obtain my own signal. If I recall rightly, that's how Ace was destroyed, tracking down Kilobyte through the internet? Repairing the gaps in the universe?'

Mark watched the fire for a few moments before answering. 'Sparx,' he mumbled. 'She… there was nothing else left, and she was tired of—' Everything, he thought. This world, these people. '—of fighting, so... Anyway, apart from you she was the only one left from the Sixth Dimension. She was the only one who could find you.' Even if it took all her remaining power to do it, he added, mentally. 'Like she said, it'd always been personal between you two. Chuck thinks that maybe you were connected that way, or something.'

'So she decided to go out with her customary blaze of glory,' Felicity said, knowingly, and Mark was a little surprised when she added: 'Good for her.'

'What?'

'You heard,' Felicity watched a new strand of fireworks lighting up the distance – from someone else's fire, not theirs. Theirs seemed to have run out and the kids had been reduced to playing with Sparklers. 'I didn't have the same courage, you know this. There was nothing more for us here, so she did the one thing left that she could do for this world. I suppose that is why she was considered a _hero_.'

_And why you're not? _Mark thought. That was a big thing for her to say, though, so he didn't comment. But he got what she meant. He knew what it felt like. He knew how _Sparx_ had felt, knowing there wasn't anything left of her old life.

'And so we reach our stalemate,' Felicity sighed. 'I really am the last of them, aren't I?'

'Chuck says that that's because you were kind of like us anyway,' Mark said. 'Because you can morph and take our shapes.'

'And why didn't you just believe that I was already dead, too, like all the others? That you'd already won?' She said _believed_, Mark noticed. Not _thought_ or _assumed. Believed._

'So you _did_ fake it.'

'I had to get you off my back somehow,' she said without apology, finally deciding not to eat the marshmallow and placing it back in the packet with this weird kind of... well, _poise_ that people didn't usually have around marshmallows. Mark had to bite his tongue not to laugh, which would've just been stupid of him, not to mention inappropriate. 'You were never going to trust me after the final battle, or whatever you prefer to call it.'

'You chose Kilobyte,' Mark was trying not to let the anger show, now. It was too late for that and he was too sick of being mad at her for it. Maybe because a part of him knew that it wasn't her fault. Maybe because he knew that Rick had added so many developed files to her after she died and came back, that it would have been almost impossible for her to fight it. Maybe because he knew that it was almost as much his fault for trying to trust the programmer in the first place (what else had he been supposed to do, the two worlds were coming to an end on his doorstep, Chuck had been stumped, they'd had to trust _someone.)_'In the end the program was stronger than you.'

'And Ace was already dead, by this point,' Felicity said. 'I had nothing left to protect,' she pushed embers around with her feet. 'I knew you could take care of yourselves.'

'That wasn't the point,' Mark muttered.

'Perhaps it's exactly the point. Anyhow, faking death seemed the most convenient option. Are you going to delete me, now?'

Mark went back to watching the fire. 'No. That doesn't matter anymore, does it? Besides, everyone deserves a second chance, Elspeth.'

The use of her other name -her real name- seemed to surprise her, if only a little bit. 'Elspeth. _He_ told you that?'

'No, I looked it up,' Mark reached out towards the fire. 'They _did_ give you a real name, they just forgot about it. Anyway, Chuck thought you might have gone back to Unity Inc. You know, the people who made Ace Lightning? We know that you bribed someone there for information. My… friend, Heather, managed to get a lead.'

'Smart girl,' Felicity spoke in a voice that wasn't that of Felicity Fury at all. But then, there wasn't much left of the woman called Felicity, if she'd ever really existed in the first place. 'Or perhaps I'm just slipping.'

'Well, choosing the name _Sara_ _Arachne_?' Mark raised an eyebrow. 'Just a bit obvious, wasn't it?'

'Perhaps. And I suppose I owe you a thanks for this… second chance, do I, Mark? Or is it the third chance, now?'

If Lady Illusion was still the same person she had been ten years ago, then Mark knew the second/third/fourth chance was nothing she wouldn't have taken herself, with or without his approval. But he didn't say this. Other than that, he can't think of a better answer than, 'well, Chuck would probably think it'd be a good idea…'

'Humans always did have a lot of strange ideas about such debts,' Lady Illusion said. 'I'm not human. You are. But you _did_ win the game. He would've been proud of that.'

_You're right there_, Mark thought. 'So… what'll you do now?'

'I hadn't thought about it,' she said, honestly. 'Perhaps a new morph is in order. I've always been curious about the mortal interest in the paranormal. And now you know that the paranormal exists… or it did, in my world, anyway. I'd like to look for it here. You have institutions that study such phenomenon, don't you?'

Mark tried as hard as he could to process the idea of Lady Illusion in college. Maybe it wasn't as weird as it sounded. Felicity had been a student, after all. 'I guess…' He waited for a few seconds, knowing that she was looking at him in amusement. '...what?'

'I'm just wondering,' Felicity said, 'when you're going to tell me.'

'Tell you...?'

'That you're glad it's over, Mark,' Felicity waved towards the bonfire. 'The fighting. The _war_. The need to always be there for him. It's been five years now. I thought you, of all people, would have moved on.'

Moved on. Mark wasn't sure exactly what she meant by that. It'd been years since the world was reset. He remembered how the two worlds had clashed together and started to destroy them both. He remembered the way Ace died (and he _did_ die, no matter what anyone else might've said) trying to stop it and how when it was all over and the two worlds were separate once again, the Game had vanished from Mark's hard drive and, as far as he knew, just stopped existing altogether.

But not all of them had vanished. There had been... glitches, Chuck said. People who just slipped through the cracks when the game fell apart. Sparx hadn't vanished. Neither had the zombie that still hung around the mini golf course. At least, he hadn't until recently.

And neither had Lady Illusion. He'd seen her vanish into the crowds around the carnival the day after the portal closed for the last time, leaving their two worlds permanently separated. He knew she'd be alright (he'd been more worried about all the people who might've gotten in her way). She adapted to the situation, as only she could. Mark couldn't explain why they survived when nobody else did, but it hadn't lasted anyway, not after their programs started breaking down like the game had before them.

But she was _still_ here, after all these years. They'd both moved on since that Fourth of July.

'So what are _you_ going to do now, mortal? What becomes of the one-time hero?'

Mark shook his head, staring into the flames. 'I guess I'm still figuring that out, too.'

'Difficult, isn't it?' Lady Illusion smiled. 'Having to start over, after spending what feels like forever on one task. It's kind of like having to rebuild your existence from scratch. But what would you know of that?' she frowned, meaningfully. 'You're a human. Your world still exists, thanks to him.'

'I know it can't have been easy for you,' Mark mumbled. It was the most sympathy he could convince himself he felt. She'd never accept it from him, anyway. He _does_ know, really.

'There is a saying from one of your people, Mark. It states that _necessity_ _is the mother of invention_,' she said. 'Things have a tendency to change. That's the way of things. My world couldn't change anymore. That's why it died.'

'But you _can_ change,' Mark caught on.

'Into whatever is required of me,' Lady Illusion nodded.

There was nothing more for either of them to say, really.

'You look like him,' Lady Illusion voice said from Felicity's face. Her hand touched his chin, turning his face towards her. 'It's the eyes, perhaps. Did you ever notice that, mortal?'

She didn't give him a chance to respond before leaning forwards and kissing him, soft and disturbingly human. Except that human beings were never that cold. Not really. He actually kind of expected his lips to _hurt_ in the morning.

But she _was _real. That was what he wanted to tell her, just like he'd wanted to tell Ace and Sparx and all the rest. And he probably would have, if he wasn't feeling so embarrassed right at that moment.

'…Congratulations,' Lady Illusion got to her feet, while reaching out to touch the fire with her fingertips. 'I'll see you again, someday, mortal,'

Mark managed to find his tongue for long enough to answer. 'No, you won't.'

'You're right,' Felicity said, and then she stood upright and turned away.

Mark still didn't say anything. He just sat there and watched as she vanished into the darkness.

_Fin. _

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Concrit is appreciated. 


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